segunda-feira, 16 de novembro de 2015

A few hours before the
catastrophic attack in Paris, President Obama had announced that ISIS was now
“contained,” a recalibration of his earlier assessments of “on the run” and
“Jayvees” from a few years back. In the hours following the attack of jihadist suicide
bombers and mass murderers in Paris, the Western press talked of the “scourge
of terrorism” and “extremist violence”. Who were these terrorists and generic
extremists who slaughtered the innocent in Paris — anti-abortionists, Klansmen,
Tea-party zealots?

Middle Eastern websites may be crowing over
the jihadist rampage and promising more to come, but this past week in the
United States we were obsessed over a yuppie son of a multi-millionaire
showboating his pseudo-grievances by means of a psychodramatic hunger strike at
the University of Missouri and a crowd of cry-baby would-be fascists at Yale
bullying a wimpy teacher over supposedly hurtful Halloween costumes. I guess
that is the contemporary American version of Verdun and the Battle of the
Bulge.

This sickness in the West manifests itself in
a variety of creepy ways — to hide bothersome reality by inventing euphemisms
and idiocies likely “workplace violence” and “largely secular,” jailing a
“right-wing” video maker rather than focusing on jihadist killers in Benghazi,
deifying a grade-school poseur inventor who repackaged a Radio Shack clock and
wound up winning an invitation to the White House, straining credibility in
Cairo to fabricate unappreciated Islamic genius. Are these the symptoms of a post-Christian
therapeutic society whose affluence and leisure fool it into thinking that it
has such a huge margin of security that it can boast of its ‘tolerance’ and
empathy — at the small cost of a few anonymous and unfortunate civilians
sacrificed from time to time? Is deterrence a waning asset that has now been
exhausted after seven years of Obama administration apologetics and
contextualizations?

Our premodern enemies have certainly got our
postmodern number. Newsmen compete to warn us not of more jihadists to come or
the nature of the Islamist hatred that fuels these murderers, but instead fret
about Western “backlash” on the horizon, about how nativists and right-wingers
may now “scapegoat” immigrants. Being blown apart may be one thing, but
appearing illiberal over the flying body parts is quite another. Let’s hurry up
and close Guantanamo Bay so that it will stop “breeding” terrorists; and let’s
hurry up even more to restart the “peace talks” to remind ISIS that we are nice
to the Palestinians.

Hundreds of thousands flock to Europe not in
gratitude at its hospitality but largely contemptuous of those who would be so
naive to extend their hospitality to those who hate them. Barack Obama recently
called global warming our greatest threat; Al Gore — recently enriched by
selling a TV station to carbon-exporting Persian Gulf kleptocrats — is in Paris
in Old Testament mode finger-pointing at our existential enemy — carbon. John
Kerry, hours before the Paris attacks, announced that the days of ISIS “are
numbered.” Angela Merkel welcomes hundreds of thousands of young male Muslims
into Europe, and the more they arrive with anything but appreciation
for their hosts, the more Westerners can assuage their guilt by turning
the other cheek and announcing their progressive fides.

To preserve our sense of
progressive utopianism, we seem willing to offer up a few hundred innocents
each year to radical Islam. The slaughter might cease in a few years if we were
to name our enemies as radical Muslims and make them aware that it could well
be suicidal for their cause to kill a Westerner — or at least remind the
Islamic world in general that it is a rare privilege to migrate to the West,
given that immigration demands civic responsibilities as well as rights and
subsidies, and is predicated on legality rather than the power of the stampede.
But then to do that we would no longer be Westerners as we now define
ourselves.​

The murder of some 127 innocents in Paris by a jihadi gang on Friday has
again shocked the French and led to another round of solidarity, soul
searching, and anger. In the end, however, Islamist violence against Westerners
boils down to two questions: How much will this latest atrocity turn public
opinion? And how much will it further spur the Establishment to deny reality?

As these questions suggest, the people and the professionals are moving
in opposite directions, the former to the right, the latter to the left. In the
end, this clash much reduces the impact of such events on policy.

Public opinion moves against Islamists specifically and Islam more
generally when the number of deaths is large enough. America's three thousand
dead on 9/11 stands out as by far the largest mortality but many other
countries have had their equivalent – the Bali bombings for Australia, the
railroad bombing for Spain, the Beslan school massacre for Russia, the
transportation bombings for Britain.

Sheer numbers are not the only consideration. Other factors can multiply
the impact of an assault, making it almost the political equivalent of mass
carnage: (1) The renown of those attacked, such as Theo van Gogh in the
Netherlands and the Charlie Hebdo office in France. (2) The
professional status of the victim, such as soldiers or police. (3) High-profile
circumstances, such as the Boston Marathon bombing.

In addition to the over 27,000 attacks globally connected to Islam since
9/11, or more than 5 per day (as counted by TheReligionOfPeace.com), a huge
increase in illegal immigration from the Middle East recently exacerbated
feelings of vulnerability and fear. It's a one-way street, with not a single
soul ever heard to announce, "I used to worry about Islamism but I don't
any more."

These cases make more Westerners worried about Islam and related topics
from the building of minarets to female infibulation. Overall, a relentless
march rightwards is underway. Surveys of European attitudes show
60 to 70 percent of voters expressing these concerns. Populist individuals like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands
and parties like the Sweden Democrats are surging in the
polls.

But when it comes to the Establishment – politicians, the police, the
press, and the professors – the unrelenting violence has a contrary effect.
Those charged with interpreting the attacks live in a bubble of public denial
(what they say privately is another matter) in which they feel compelled to
pretend that Islam has no role in the violence, out of concern that to
recognize it would cause even more problems.

These 4-P professionals bald-facedly feign belief in a mysterious
"violent extremist" virus that seems to afflict only Muslims,
prompting them to engage in random acts of barbaric violence. Of the many preposterous statements by politicians, my
all-time favorite is what Howard Dean, the former governor of
Vermont, said about the Charlie Hebdo jihadis: "They're
about as Muslim as I am."

This defiance of common sense has survived each atrocity and I predict
that it will also outlast the Paris massacre. Only a truly massive loss of
life, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands, will force the professionals to
back off their deeply ingrained pattern of denying an Islamic component in the
spate of attacks.

That pattern has the very consequential effect of shutting out the fears
of ordinary voters, whose views thereby have negligible impact on policy.
Worries about Shari'a, rape gangs, exotic diseases, and bloodbaths are
dismissed with charges of "racism" and "Islamophobia," as
though name-calling addresses these real issues.

More surprising yet, the professionals respond to the public's move to
the right by themselves moving to the left, encouraging more immigration from
the Middle East, instituting more "hate speech" codes to suppress
criticism of Islam, and providing more patronage to Islamists. This pattern
affects not just Establishment figures of the Left but more strikingly also of
the Right (such as Angela Merkel of Germany); only Eastern European leaders
such as Hungary's Viktor Orbán permit themselves to speak honestly about the
real problems.

Eventually, to be sure, voters' views will make themselves heard, but decades
later and more weakly than democratically should have been the case.

Placing the murderous rampage in Paris into this context: it will likely
move public sentiments substantially in one direction and Establishment
policies in quite the opposite way, therefore ultimately having only a limited
impact.

EUROPE'S democracies are standing united in the face of the nihilist
terror which struck the heart of the continent on November 13th. With no
fear, this time, of alienating patriotic voters, David Cameron managed a few
words of French as he expressed his solidarity with the French people.

Even before the latest attacks, it was clear that the leading
governments of Europe faced broadly the same dilemma. Within the large and
growing Muslim communities which every European state now hosts, a minority is
attracted by the cause of violent extremism, at home or abroad. The challenge
is to keep that minority small and make sure that the rest of society,
including the rising generation of Muslims, plays its part in this.

But in their approaches to this problem, European states have always had
differences, often robust ones. At least in pre-9/11 days, French security
chiefs used to refer scathingly to "Londonistan" because of the
British capital's willingness to harbour Islamist opponents of secular regimes,
like the one which usurped power in Algeria.

There are differences of ideology as well as practice. Like America,
only a bit more so, the French republic has a specific set of founding
principles and it expects all citizens to accept them, however diverse they may
be in other respects. It is agreed that one of the purposes of universal
education is to inculcate those ideals. That is in sharp contrast with the
British ideal of multiculturalism. To French eyes, it seems that Britain has
been too lax in allowing immigrant sub-cultures, like the Asian Muslim enclaves
of northern England. The existence of British schools (whether private or
within the state system) where the ethos is that of ultra-conservative Islam
can seem astonishing to observers from France, or from other European states where
education is more centralised.

Britain now acknowledges that multiculturalism has gone too far,
especially in education, but in a country that lacks a written constitution,
there is uncertainty over what common denominator citizens and schoolchildren
should be asked to accept. Whatever answer is found, it will not as demanding
as the French approach. In Britain, the decade-old French law that bars
headscarves from schools seems like an infringement of liberty. When Jack
Straw, the former foreign secretary, said he preferred Muslim visitors to his
office not to wear full face-veils, he was denounced as grossly insensitive by
fellow Labour politicians. That
sentiment is still widespread.

Not only is each European country different, each one is changing at a
different pace and in a different direction. In contrast with secular France,
post-war Germany has always had a lot of religious education, Protestant and
Catholic, in its school system. Now there is increasing provision for Islam;
what will happen after the arrival of more than a million refugees, mostly
Muslim, is anybody's guess. The Netherlands used to be generously multicultural
but a sharp reaction set in after the murder of Theo van Gogh, a film-maker, by
a Muslim fanatic in 2004, and the effects are still palpable.

The hard truth is that no European country has found the ideal balance
between accepting diversity (which is the natural impulse of a liberal
democratic state) and demanding adherence to a common set of values. That is
because no perfect balance exists.

France has done its collective best to offer Muslim citizens a hard
secularist bargain: accept the ideals of the republic, which include the
religious neutrality of the state, and you will be as free to practice your
religion as any Catholic, Protestant or Jew. It has more-or-less successfully
imposed that bargain on the organisations which speak for Islam in France. But
inevitably, there are those who reject it. For the great majority of French
citizens of Muslim heritage, the republic's offer is probably acceptable. But if
only 1% of young French Muslims radically reject it that is easily enough to
provide terrorist movements with ample recruits.

Exactly the same applies to the somewhat different bargains that every
other European state is offering. There is no ideal solution, but we still have
to keep looking for one.

HOURS AFTER France and America pledged to ramp up the war against
Islamic State (IS) in response to attacks in Paris that killed 129 and wounded
more than 350, French warplanes began pounding the group’s stronghold in Raqqa,
in north-eastern Syria. The operation was conducted in co-ordination with
American forces. The French and Americans seemed to be unified over the name
they are using for this terrorist scourge, too. Announcing strikes, the French
defence ministry referred to a target “used by Daish as a command post”. Barack
Obama used the same term when he spoke, at a G20 leaders’ summit in Turkey, of
redoubling efforts “to bring about a peaceful transition in Syria and to
eliminate Daish as a force that can create so much pain and suffering for
people in Paris, in Ankara, and in other parts of the globe.” John Kerry, the
American secretary of state, also called IS Daish during a meeting in
Vienna. The group has variously been dubbed ISIS, ISIL, IS and SIC too. Why the
alphabet soup?

Part of the reason is that the group has evolved over time, changing its
own name. It started as a small but viciously effective part of the Sunni
resistance to America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, calling itself al-Qaeda in Iraq,
or AQI. In 2007, following the death of its founder (and criticism from
al-Qaeda for being too bloodthirsty), AQI rebranded itself the Islamic State in
Iraq, or ISI. It suffered setbacks on its home turf, but as Syria descended
into civil war in 2011 ISI spotted an opportunity. By 2013 it had inserted
itself into eastern Syria and adopted a new name to match: the Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Increasing the confusion, ISIS changed its name yet
again in June 2014, declaring itself the State of the Islamic Caliphate (SIC),
a title that reflects its ambitions to rule over Muslims everywhere.

Translation presents another opportunity for acronyms to flourish. In
its earlier incarnation as ISIS, the group had sought to challenge
"colonialist" borders by using an old Arab geographical
term—al-Sham—that applies either to the Syrian capital, Damascus, or to the
wider region of the Levant; hence the official American preference for calling
it Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, rather than ISIS. The Arabic
for this, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil ’Iraq wal-Sham, can be abbreviated to Daish,
just as the Palestinian group Hamas (which means "zeal") is an
acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or Islamic Resistance Movement.
Daish is the name that has widely stuck among Arabs, although the group’s
own members call it simply the State, al-Dawla, for short, and threaten with
lashes those who use Daish. (Daish and Daesh are one and the same acronym in
Arabic, merely transliterated differently for the Roman script.)

There is a long history of pinning unpleasant-sounding names on
unpleasant people. Rather as the term Nazi caught on in English partly because
of its resonance with words such as "nasty", Daish rolls
pleasurably off Arab tongues as a close cousin of words meaning to stomp,
crush, smash into, or scrub. Picking up on this, France has officially adopted
the term for government use; its foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, has
explained that Daish has the added advantage of not granting the group the
dignity of being called a state. Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, has
cast similar aspersions, denouncing the group as a “Non-Islamic Non-State”.
Rather than obediently adopting the acronym NINS, this newspaper has chosen for
the time being to continue calling the group simply Islamic State (IS).